


Something for a Pawnbroker

by Island_of_Reil



Category: The Lost Prince - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Dissociation, Dubious Consent, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Missing Scene, Parent Death, Past Child Abuse, Period-Typical Ableism, Poverty, Seizures, Underage Prostitution, body betrayal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-16
Updated: 2013-10-16
Packaged: 2017-12-29 13:17:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“Do you see my crutches? I did something for a pawnbroker last night, and he gave them to me for pay.”</i> The Rat paid much more dearly for them than he would have with money.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something for a Pawnbroker

All of a sudden, his father ceased to thrash about in the Rat’s grip.

The scrape of the splintered wooden chair, the thud of a tumbling body, and the glassy _thunk_ of the gin bottle had woken the Rat out of a dreaming nightmare into a living one. From the malodourous and vermin-infested heap of rags they slept upon, he had dragged himself forward and thrown himself atop the spasming form of the elder Ratcliffe, trying to contain the violence of the fit within his stick-like arms. His useless legs had flopped about as his father convulsed and uttered staccato moans and screams. Twice, the Rat’s head had been driven into the oaken floor-boards, hard under their thick felt-like layer of filth. He had swallowed against the literally blinding pain and hung on.

In the midst of it some-one had pounded on the wall that divided their garret from the next one. “Shut yer gob in there!”

“ _Help me!_ ” the Rat had screamed. “He’s _dying!_ ”

“Oh, balls, ‘e’s just blotto again!” the unseen man had roared back through the wall, just as the Rat’s head struck the floor the second time.

But none of that was as horrible as feeling his father go utterly limp in his arms and knowing why. He knew why even before he saw the staring unseeing eyes, and the reddish froth clinging to one corner of the parted lips; even before he realised he felt no heart beating in the breast beneath his, nor saw any pulse at his father’s throat.

With trembling arms the Rat lowered him to the floor. His head throbbed in a sickly way from the blows it had taken, and his stomach clenched and inverted as though having a seizure of its own.

He hadn’t loved his father. Had hated him bitterly, in fact. The man had already fallen far from the grace of his birth when he took a position as a master at a great school, and that last chance he’d pissed away too, leaving himself and his wife and son to sink into a penury that deepened by the year. When the Rat was four years old, his angry and terrified mother had stepped between him and his father’s fists. With one blow his father had sent her reeling; her head struck the mantel as she fell, and she never woke again. And hadn’t his father made up for _that_ thwarted beating in the years to come!

But none of this kept the Rat from reaching out a shaking hand to pull down one eyelid, then the other, then to blot the bloody foam away with the sleeve of his own shirt and gently push his father’s jaw up till his mouth snapped shut. For all the man had been a worthless wretch, still he had been a gentleman, and the Rat a gentleman’s son. It would not do to let him be found open-eyed and drooling blood.

He pushed himself off his father’s corpse and dragged himself back to the rag-pile, where he tried to think of what to do through a haze of shock and dizziness and pain. He had not eaten since well before supper-time the night before. There was nothing to eat. More importantly, he’d had no desire to eat.

His lack of appetite had begun with an afternoon visit to the pawnbroker’s.

\---

For a few weeks he’d had his eye on a pair of old but serviceable-looking crutches in the dirty front window. If he and Marco were going to carry the Sign to the Secret Ones far and wide, he’d need crutches as well as his platform. The pair for pawn had belonged to a man, not a boy, but they didn’t seem so long that he wouldn’t be able to put his toes to the ground while leaning on them.

All the gilt and most of the letters’ outlines had long since faded from the transparency on the door-pane, but the three golden balls above the lintel plainly said what manner of shop it was. Stopping his wheeled platform at the threshold, the Rat peered into the dusty gloom of the interior.

The shop had been bustling every time he’d passed it before, filled with people willing to sell everything from precious memories of loved ones lost to the implements they needed to earn their keep, for as little as what would buy a loaf of bread. Just now, the only patron was a scrawny man of middling height whose unshaven face was a garden of gin-blossoms. He gesticulated at the hammer and saw laid atop the counter, his hands trembling visibly.

“Cor, those’s werf at least three bob apiece!”

The pawnbroker was a tallish brawny man with a bristling black beard and hard eyes of the same shade. “Two an’ six for boaf,” he said, less loudly than the customer but with both iron and vinegar in his voice.

They went back and forth till the patron threw up his shaking hands in defeat. The pawnbroker counted out the two shillings and sixpence and handed them to the other man, who pocketed them immediately and turned on his heel, muttering. He bumped into the Rat’s platform on his way out of the shop and cursed the Rat roundly for it. The Rat flinched, expecting a blow, but the man had turned his back on him already and was disappearing down the street.

The Rat wheeled himself over the threshold of the shop. The pawnbroker trained a narrowed beady gaze on him.

“Wot d’ _you_ want?”

It was what the Rat was used to, but it was not an encouraging start. He took a deep breath and said, “Please, sir, I was hoping to buy the crutches in the window.”

The pawnbroker gave him a steady, searching look. Though he did not know exactly why, it made the Rat’s belly turn to water. Then the look abruptly broke into a sneer.

“‘Buy,’ ‘e says. Like you’ve the five bob ter buy ‘em wif.” The pawnbroker picked up the newly pawned hammer and saw and rather pointedly turned his back to stow them on a shelf above his head.

The Rat’s heart sank. On five shillings he and his father could have gone more than a week without missing a meal.

“Sir, might I … do some kind of service for you, in exchange for the crutches? An errand, perhaps?”

The man fell still. He slowly turned to face the Rat again.

“‘Service,’ eh?”

And the Rat at once understood the man’s disquieting look of a moment ago. His stomach turned over, and he fought the blind urge to turn about and wheel himself as far from the shop as he could and forget about getting himself a pair of crutches, ever.

“Yes, sir. Anything you want.” His throat constricted about the word _anything_ , and it came out in a croak, but he forced himself to hold the pawnbroker’s gaze without wavering.

Another several seconds, an eternity, of the gaze that might, just might, be worse than giving the man anything he wanted. Then the pawnbroker’s lips curled into an extremely unpleasant smile.

“I close up at six. Come back ‘ere at ‘alf-past. Front door’ll be locked. Use the back door.”

The Rat swallowed hard once again. “Yes, sir,” he all but whispered. He turned his platform round and sped from the shop.

\---

He wasn’t sure if it were better or worse that the Squad was nowhere to be found afterward. He’d lied to them early in the afternoon that he’d something to do for his father later on, and by three-thirty they’d all scarpered.

In his short life he’d been spared few indignities, but one of them was, for the most part, unwanted lewd attention. Oh, he’d been touched up before, to be sure. There were always some whose first thought when they looked at a crippled boy was, _He can’t run very far._ But he’d suffered less of it than most boys, and certainly far less of it than any girl.

Never before had he bartered himself for anything. Not even food, not even at his most famished. He wondered if he could count it as a matter of pride if no-one had ever made him the offer before.

He spent the next few hours in the flagstoned inclosure behind the railings of the old church graveyard, reading and re-reading the scrap of newspaper his father once had brought home wrapped about a loaf of bread. He tried to quell the shaking of his hands by thinking of the Secret Party, who had kept their oath of fealty to the long-lost Fedorovitch prince down through the centuries. How did a chap keep that kind of faith? The Rat couldn’t even trust when he woke each morning that he’d eat before the sun went down, or that his father wouldn’t knock him about for coming home with empty pockets.

He imagined himself in the great cities of the Continent, on ancient roads running through its lush green countrysides, swinging himself forward on his new crutches as deftly as a strong man in his prime would walk. He imagined the look of joy blossoming on the faces of the Secret Ones as he and Marco gave them the Sign of the Rising, a look that would then harden into steely determination. He imagined ducking under a rain of bullets. If he could face a rain of bullets, he thought, he could endure an unpleasant half-hour to earn himself the crutches—couldn’t he?

And he imagined Marco, standing next to him on a high road, a triangle of satiny olive skin visible between his scarf and his open greatcoat. Marco singing the folk-songs of Samavia, an operetta or two in the mix, in his vibrant voice that was already rich and deep for his age and that promised even more richness and depth as he grew into manhood, whilst the Rat put on his best pleading look and ducked his head in deferential gratitude whenever passers-by dropped coins into his upturned cap. Marco lying beside him in warm meadows that smelled like flowers and sweet hay, smiling at him, reaching for him—

He shook his head, sending the pleasing thoughts scattering like drops of rain. He could not think such things.

He had turned thirteen six months before, in a September that had brought a sweet cool close to the most hellish summer in living memory. The newspapers had said that in the country, the fields were blasted brown and the gorse catching fire, the cows gave no milk and the birds no songs. In the city, the wells ran dry, food spoilt fast, labourers either walked off the job or died on their feet, and small children in the rookeries sweltered by the hundreds. For the rest of his life, whenever he thought of those months, the Rat would remember them as one long stretch of thirsty, ill-slept, itching, sweating misery.

But it wasn’t till the winter that he truly began to burn, and he wondered if he would ever stop.

Oh, he knew what it was, even if no adult had ever spoken of such things to him. It was the same thing that drove most men’s brains straight out of their heads at the sight of a pretty girl. Or a not-so-pretty girl. If only he’d a farthing for every time he’d ever seen a man emerging from a dark alley, tucking his limp cock back into his trousers, then slipping a coin into the sore-covered palm of a woman whose face not only could have stopped Big Ben but shattered its dials to boot.

It’d have been bad enough if it’d been girls he fancied. A cripple hadn’t a snowflake’s chance in hell of catching a girl’s eye, except in pity. Not even crippled war heroes, judging by the ones he’d seen for himself. 

But it wouldn’t have been terrifying. Terrifying was seeing one of the older lads of his Squad take off his shirt on an unusually mild day, as was the fellow’s wont, and feeling his heart begin to pound and his mouth go dry and all the blood rushing to the centre of his body. Everything there, unlike his legs, seemed to work just fine.

One cruel joke of nature piled atop another, stacked upon a third.

He didn’t give a toss for what the churchmen said. Let them spend a week in St Giles or Whitechapel without going back to their cosy houses at night, and maybe he’d listen to what they had to say. Or maybe not. He shared his father’s utter lack of concern for what might lie in the life after this one. 

He did, however, give a toss for what the boys and men of the street thought. He knew there were those who sought one another out for pleasure, and sometimes more than pleasure. And he knew how most men and boys regarded their like—and how they corrected them, in revulsion and anger.

Maybe some of their like could fight back. The Rat wouldn’t be one of those.

In any case, Marco was a fine gentleman, even if he were very young and poor. And even if he… had such feelings too, and the Rat couldn’t believe he did, whyever would he want a hunchbacked cripple, a filthy guttersnipe, the get of a drunken brute?

No-one could know. No-one could ever know. 

Six o’clock came round. The lift in his mood from picturing himself at Marco’s side had long faded, replaced with the despair he never showed to another living soul but hid within a shell of intellect and ferocity and command. Everyone had his own sorrows and didn’t need those of another, and a great many wouldn’t scruple to use a chap's own desperation against him. But it was a familiar companion, and a better one than the queasy fear brought on by thinking about the pawnbroker’s large rough hands and hard eyes and vicious smile. He began, as slowly as he could, to wheel himself back in the direction of the pawnshop.

At six twenty-five he pulled himself and his platform into the rear doorway, now deep in evening’s shadows. The cool bulb of the doorknob turned easily beneath his unsteady hand, the door itself creaking on its hinges as it opened inward. He rolled himself into the shop and pushed the door closed behind him. Though it did not close so loudly, the sound echoed in the dark silence like the slammed gate of a gaol-cell.

“Yer early. Eager for it, are yer?”

The Rat nearly jumped into the air from his platform. In the dim of the shop he spied the the pawnbroker’s bulky frame leant against the front counter, his arms folded. He couldn’t see the man’s face, but the leering tone of voice and the salacious implication rendered that entirely unnecessary. Bile rose in the Rat’s throat, and his gut burned with acid.

Anger was better than fear. But he couldn’t show it.

“I told you I’d be here,” he said as evenly as he could, “and I am.” He thought of the crutches. He thought of Marco. “If I do this, you _are_ going to give me the crutches, aren’t you?”

“Are yer callin’ me a fief an’ a liar?” the shop owner demanded indignantly.

“No, sir,” the Rat said hastily, alarm flaring in his breast.

“Well, good, ‘cos I ain’t. Wo’ever else I am, I’m a man of my word. Yeah, the crutches is yers… once I’m done wif yer.”

The Rat gulped air. “What do you want me to do?”

The pawnbroker jerked a thumb to his right. “See that curtain?”

The Rat’s night-vision was as good as that of his four-legged namesake, but he didn’t need it to see the draped doorway, thinly outlined with a light coming from behind it. He gave a short nod.

“In there. Go.”

Heart pounding now, the Rat wheeled down the narrow aisle, then turned. The curtain was split perhaps two thirds of the way up to the hooks, and the halves of it parted around his head, releasing a cloud of dust, tobacco, and mildew that caught at his lungs and made him hack.

On the other side he blinked in the candlelight, though it was not strong. The room was a small, dingy, airless rectangle. The one window, high up on the wall, had been nailed shut and a thin grimy curtain drawn over it. In the far corner along the same wall was a small standing wardrobe, and closer to the doorway a small table with two chairs. The table was strewn with sundry paper-work, atop which stood the cheap tallow candle in its holder. Beside it lay a tobacco tin, a package of cigarette papers, a match-box, and a brimming ash-tray. Under the table was a not-quite-empty chamberpot. Flush against the opposite wall was a long but narrow bed. Next to it on the floor lay a threadbare piece of rug that might have once been red.

Heavy foot-falls approached the curtain from the other side, and the Rat wheeled further into the room. The curtain parted to admit the pawnbroker. The Rat lowered his head to stare at the floor. Let the man take it for rank submission. Anything to not look into that leering face.

“Undress yerself,” the pawnbroker ordered. A hoarse note had begun to worm its way into his voice.

The Rat closed his eyes and pulled his shabby, filthy shirt up, over his bare thin chest, the hump of his back, his unwashed hair. He dropped it to the floor near the table. Then he hesitated, opening his eyes again.

“Wot’s the matter?” the pawnbroker demanded.

“I… I can’t take my trousers off on this platform.”

The man leant forward, seized him roughly under his arms, and flung him onto the bed, which creaked in protest under his negligible weight. Its covers stank. He would have landed on his back, but he stuck out his arms behind him instinctively, leaning backward with his chest thrust out and his legs lying before him.

The pawnbroker stepped forward. His eyes seemed to have caught fire, and they turned the Rat’s blood to ice.

“Take ‘em orf. Now.”

The Rat pressed his teeth into his lower lip. His teeth were sharp, and it hurt, but the pain was a welcome distraction. He pulled up each of his legs to untie the shoe and pull it off and let it drop. Then he undid his belt and dropped it as well. He got his legs over the edge of the bed, lifted his hips, pushed down the waistbands of his trousers and skivvies as one, and worked both garments down over his needle-thin legs till they fell to the floor too. The pawnbroker’s breathing grew heavier and rougher. The Rat bit down harder, tasting blood and feeling tears prick at his eyes.

He closed them again when he first felt the pawnbroker’s hands. They ran over the hunch of his back with patent curiosity, then down his chest with completely different intent. When they dropped into his lap, he jerked spasmodically, then gripped the edge of the bed so that sheer instinct wouldn’t compel him to tear himself out of the man’s grasp. His throat burned with bile once more—and then he realised, with horror and shame, that he was swelling within the pawnbroker’s calloused fist.

He heard an obscene chuckle. “My, my. I were right ‘bout you.”

It was an odd feeling, his mind separating from his body. He’d often felt detached from the world when he read, able to drown out the most ungodly of noises, but then again reading took him to another place entirely. His mind was still in this room, though, somewhere up near the stained ceiling, observing the slight body sitting on the edge of the bed responding to a loathsome touch just as it would to a touch fervently desired. Many times in the last half-year he’d experienced the disconcerting phenomenon of becoming physically excited with no apparent cause; sometimes several times a day at that, which could become wearisome. He’d never before been physically excited yet completely repulsed—never mind completely repulsed _and_ thoroughly terrified.

“Right,” the pawnbroker said thickly. He grabbed the narrow shoulders, turned the slight body completely about, and pushed it face-down onto the bed. For a short while he pawed at the small emaciated buttocks. Then he lifted one hand and spat into it, and he let it fall again and began to press it inward.

The Rat watched the small body jerk in response to the intrusion, heard it catch its breath and thereafter begin breathing raggedly. The pawnbroker laughed again, more loudly and more evilly, as he continued to probe. It went on for… a while, the Rat supposed. Whatever this odd state of mind was, it wasn’t much good for keeping track of time.

The pawnbroker’s breathing eventually drowned out that of the lad on the bed. His hands moved to fish himself out of his trousers; the Rat’s mind tore its eyes away before anything could emerge from the flap and focused them on the top of the lad’s head. He heard another spitting sound. 

Then a blunt tearing pain snapped his mind straight back into his body, and the physical arousal evaporated immediately. He was no stranger to pain, he could take a beating stone-faced, but with _this_ pain came the terrifying certainty that he would be split into bloody halves, and despite himself he shrieked.

The heel of a meaty hand slammed into the back of his head, making pinpricks of light dance before his eyes. “Shut yer gob,” the pawnbroker panted, grabbing the Rat’s scrawny hips and continuing to force his way in. The Rat buried his face in the foul-smelling coverlet and bit into the crusty fabric, smothering the next wail into an agonised groan.

Finally the pawnbroker was all the way in. He pulled out again, and shoved himself back in, and did so over and over and over. Each time the solid mass of his body slammed anew into the Rat’s small rail-thin one, driving the breath out of the Rat’s lungs. With every thrust the pawnbroker was rubbing up against flesh that he’d torn, and it hurt like blazes. The Rat’s head swam with a nauseating vision of all the blood pouring out of him after he left the shop, and maybe his innards falling out too.

Suddenly the pawnbroker gasped and began to shuttle in and out faster and harder. He made deep anguished sounds that seemed to come up from the bottoms of his lungs. The Rat screwed up his face more tightly against the coverlet— _soon, please, be done, **now**_ —and then there was a final groan, and a slimy wetness, and hot foul breaths panted out against his neck.

The pawnbroker extricated himself, released the Rat from his grip, and got off the bed. The Rat didn’t move.

“I’m done wif yer. You can get up now.” There was the rustle of him putting himself away again.

“Give me… a moment,” the Rat gasped.

“Get on wif it, you ain’t bleedin’ _that_ much,” the pawnbroker snapped. “Don’t get none of it on my bedcloves neiver.” He reached down and grabbed the Rat’s clothes and shoes off the floor and flung them onto the bed.

Shakily, the Rat pushed himself up on his hands. He turned himself about so that he was leaning on one haunch, and he began to dress himself, gingerly avoiding sitting square on the bed. The pawnbroker sat down at the table and plucked a half-smoked cigarette from the ash-tray, which he stuck between his lips and lit. He dragged on the cigarette as he watched the Rat pull his clothes back on and re-tie his shoes. The lust in his eyes was gone, replaced with a cold, annoyed impatience.

“Sir—” The Rat looked up. “Might I please ask you to get the crutches for me? I think I might be able to get out of here faster on them.” He didn’t know if he were lying or telling the truth.

The pawnbroker’s eyes narrowed, but he jabbed out the re-lit cigarette once more and rose from the table. When he had disappeared through the curtain, the Rat began to tremble. He gripped the bed’s edge once more to steady himself. He’d be shut of this place faster if he could keep himself from shaking like a leaf in a storm.

About a minute later the pawnbroker returned with the crutches under one arm. He leant them against the bed.

“Wot yer gonna do wif the cart, there?”

He’d planned to keep the platform, but the bed was hard enough under his bottom just now. He didn’t think he could stand to plant himself on a sheet of wood. Better just to get used to the crutches straightaway.

“Could I pawn it, please, sir?”

The pawnbroker, who’d sat down and taken up his cigarette and matches again, gave a short bark of laughter. “‘Oo’d want ter buy it?”

The Rat sighed. All of a sudden he was deeply weary, and he didn’t bother to keep a hint of exasperation from his voice. He had the crutches now, and that was all that mattered. “I can’t take it with me right now. If you won’t give me anything for it, just take it and do what you will with it.”

He took the crutches in hand and stood them beside the bed, then hoisted himself up on them, one under each arm. His toes and the balls of his feet touched the floor. Leaning on the left crutch, he pushed the right one forward, then pulled himself and the left one toward it. Then he did it all again, leading with the left crutch this time.

Easier than he’d thought. Unlike the sticks he hobbled around on when he was with the Squad, he could rest his arms atop these. They had handles, too, and little caps of India rubber at the bottom for better purchase. And within a year or two, he thought, he’d be able to plant both feet full on the ground. He hoped.

The pawnbroker stood, moved to the doorway, and pulled half the curtain back. The dim light of the tallow candle cast faint, eerie shadows throughout the darkened shop. “Side door again,” he said curtly. The Rat nodded. He wasn’t of a mind to give the man one last “yes, sir.”

He swung himself into the darkness. It smelled of dust and wood and wood polish and metal and ink and paper. It smelled like heaven compared with the back room. He could feel the pawnbroker’s eyes drilling into his back as he made his way back to the narrow central aisle, then turned to follow it to the rear exit. He pulled the creaky door open and thumped his way through it; it swung shut behind him a final time with the same hard, decisive click.

Briefly he leant against the brick outer wall of the shop, cool on his back through his shirt. His hands were trembling again. Had to get that under control or he’d never get home.

He breathed in deeply. City air, full of soot; far better than what he’d been breathing a short while ago. He thrust the left crutch out before him and dragged himself forward. Right crutch forward, and drag. Left crutch forward, and drag.

Easier than the sticks, certainly. Not as easy as he’d first thought. After ten minutes his arms weren’t half aching. Well, he’d have to strengthen them, he thought, resting against another wall, then pushing himself forward again and gritting his teeth against the burning in his muscles.

“Ooh, ‘e’s got hisself a pair o’ _crutches!_ ” a woman’s voice rang out. The voice was familiar enough that he could conjure her up without turning round: gown pinned up to her knee despite the sores on her shins, neckline halfway down her rib-cage, reddened hair pinned atop her head, great clouts of rouge and powder that made her look young and healthy enough so long as she didn’t stand in the lamp-light.

The local whores were a mixed lot. Generally they were civil to him, so long as they weren’t trying to draw custom at the moment he appeared. A few were kind to him. He remembered one in particular he hadn’t seen in several years, whose crippled little brother had died when she herself was a child. She always smiled at the Rat; sometimes she would wipe his face with a corner of her gown and some spit. Twice she had given him a few sweets that had been mixed in with a punter’s handful of coins.

The woman he had just passed was never civil, and neither was her friend.

“‘Ow'd ‘e get the bread fer _those_ , I wonders?” the friend demanded, just as loudly. The Rat could picture her, too. Long greasy dark hair, falling over the same grimy threadbare shift she always wore. Younger than the other and not poxy—not yet, anyway—but weak-chinned and with small piggy eyes, so they were roughly matched for beauty.

“Dunno. ‘E sure as ‘ell didn’t _steal_ ‘em. 'Ow’d ‘e run orf wif ‘em?” The two burst into laughter. They sounded like crows.

“Oi, Rat, yer a swell these days, ain’tcha?” It was the first one again. “And yer gettin’ ter be a _man_ now! You come see me next time you’ve a few bob, I’ll show yer wot ter do wiv a gal!” If her mocking tone hadn’t made it clear it wasn’t a serious offer, the renewed gales of raucous laughter did.

Which was fine, quite fine. Even if he’d fancied girls, he couldn’t imagine... His stomach curdled. No, leave that thought be. Especially after… the pawnshop.

Right crutch forward, and drag. Left crutch forward, and drag. Thump, drag. Thump, drag. Thump, drag... 

It must have taken him an hour to reach Bone Court. His arms felt like they were afire, his backside still throbbed dully, and he was knackered. But he realised, with a faint sort of pleasure shining through the fatigue, that on crutches he could reach the knob of the outer door much more easily than he ever could have from the wheeled platform.

No-one ever locked that door—why would they? He pushed against it whilst leaning on the right crutch, and it swung wide open. He staggered a bit, caught himself, and continued to thump-drag, thump-drag his way into the tenement.

It was three flights of narrow rickety stairs to the garret. He had always inched up them on his bottom and hands, stowing the platform beforehand in the enclosed alcove under the lowest flight. It was a dusty cobwebbed space otherwise occupied by decrepit bits of furniture and bric-a-brac that no-one much seemed minded to paw through, and behind these he had hid the platform. In the mornings he would retrieve it after having slid his way downstairs.

Navigating the stairs on crutches consumed whatever strength he’d had left. Pulling himself _up_ , rather than _along_ , made the muscles in his arms scream all the louder. He grit his teeth again and forced himself up each stair, fear flooding cold through his chest and belly whenever he heard the groan of old rotting wood beneath his weight. When finally he reached the garret and stood beyond the topmost stair, he heaved up a sigh from the depths of his lungs.

He thump-dragged, thump-dragged down the dark hallway to the small partition of garret he shared with his father. The key was in his right trouser pocket, but his father seldom locked the door when he was in. On the other side of it he could hear loud snoring, and once again intense relief washed over him.

His father was asleep in his chair, a half-empty gin bottle standing on the floor beside. If their room smelled any better than the one at the back of the pawnshop, it was only because the elder Ratcliffe seldom smoked and because there were fewer things to catch the odours.

The Rat shut and locked the door behind him. Slowly, carefully, he stretched out the right crutch across the rag-pile, then let himself tumble to it, and he placed both crutches off to the side. Then he removed his shoes and set them next to the crutches. It was a mild-enough night that he could have stripped to his skivvies and pulled a rag or two over himself. He never wanted to take his clothes off again, ever.

He wadded up a bit of rag and pushed it beneath his head for a pillow. Then he lay there, letting tears trickle down his cheeks and sniffling till exhaustion pulled him down like an undertow.

\---

He couldn’t have imagined that, when he woke, things would be worse. But they were: His father lay dead on the floor; and when the landlord learnt of it, the Rat would be turned out into the street.

It was still night; what time of night, he knew not. In the ten or fifteen minutes since he had woken to the cries of his father in his death-throes, no bells had rung—or perhaps the Rat had not heard them in his fright and pain. Any time-pieces his father had ever owned had long since been pawned. The Rat didn’t feel as though he’d slept for very long, but he did not trust his judgment in this, shaken as he was by the nightmares on both sides of the veil of sleep.

He had to tell some-one about his father. But whom would he tell?

His father’s family had long since forsaken the elder Ratcliffe, and the Rat along with him. His mother’s family had cut her off when she had married his father, rightly deeming him a wastrel and a blackguard; he could not remember whether any of them had even come to see her laid to rest. Even if he’d been minded to send word to the landlord of the tenement, he’d have had no idea how. The idea of seeking out a policeman, rather than trying to hide from one, made him grow cold with apprehension. 

_Marco._

The name simply appeared in his mind at first. Then it began to fix itself there, like the sun waxing strong in the sky of a summer morning after sending its first faint rays over the horizon.

He sat bolt-upright on the rag-pile, sucking in his breath sharply with the pain that came with putting weight on his bottom. He’d forgotten, briefly, about the pawnbroker in the cataclysm of his father’s passing, and the memory came back to him like a shaming hand slapping him full in the face.

He thrust that memory aside, hard, so he could think. He remembered Marco telling him when they’d first met that he lived in No. 7 Philibert Place. He knew the row, though not well; it was not terribly far from Bone Court. He gathered his crutches to himself, hauled himself upward on them, and made for the door. 

He didn’t bother to lock it behind him. There was nothing left at all, for him or for any-one else.

Standing at the head of the uppermost stairway, he paled at the sight of the stairs stretching down beneath his unpractised crutches and feet. Breathing and blinking away the new fear, he began to hop his way down. If it were more precarious, at least it was not as arduous, now that he was not fighting gravity. Before long he gained the ground floor. He hobbled to the front door, dragged it open, and emerged into the sooty London night.

His arms had not fully recovered from the evening journey home, but with the world having come crashing down around his ears, a reserve of strength he hadn’t known he’d had seemed to have opened up to him. He pulled himself along with no need to rest till he turned into Philibert Place.

It was as he leant on his crutches before the front door of No. 7 that he first hesitated. This was hardly a fine gentleman’s address, but it was a sight less squalid than Bone Court. As he had made his way here, he’d heard bells; it was now just after eleven o’clock, he reckoned. Surely Marco and his father would be abed by now.

And, it occurred to him, he knew Marco very little at all, had only ever seen him a handful of times. When they and the Squad got together and spoke of Samavia and its Lost Prince, a sort of magic descended upon them. But in the everyday world of Philibert Place and with his father at his back, would Marco deem it all just a child’s game, and the filthy urchin at his door an unwelcome nuisance?

He just might. But, the Rat told himself, what good is a soldier if he takes no risks? He screwed up his courage and pressed the door-bell.

Almost immediately he heard foot-falls, strong and measured, and a dim light leaked out from behind the door. It opened to present an old man, but one who surely had once been a soldier himself, with his erect carriage and stern bearing. In the hand that had not opened the door he held a lit taper.

“Yes?” the man asked, his voice more strongly accented than Marco’s was.

“Sir—does Marco live at this address? I need to see him, it’s urgent. Please, sir,” the Rat pleaded.

He half-expected to be turned away with a curse, but the old soldier simply said, “Wait here,” and turned about and disappeared down the dark entrance passage. The Rat heard a brief, faint exchange of men’s voices, then a lighter tread in the passage, approaching him.

Marco’s tall form emerged out of the darkness of the hallway. When he spied the Rat, his eyes widened, and his mouth fell open a bit.

“Rat. My father—” 

But the look of compassion on his face—not pity, like on the face of a churchman willing to spare nothing else, but genuine care and concern—set the Rat’s words flowing from him as though some-one had removed a brick from a dam.

“I’ve come to tell you about _my_ father,” he interrupted. “I don’t know why I’ve come, but I—I just wanted to. He’s _dead!_ ”

Marco stared blankly at him for a moment, then repeated unbelievingly, "Your father? He’s—”

“—dead,” the Rat finished for him, feeling himself beginning to tremble again. “I told you he’d kill himself. He had another fit and he died in it. I knew he would, one of these days. I told him so. He knew he would himself. I stayed with him till he was dead—and then I got a bursting headache and I felt sick—and I thought about you.”

The crutches suddenly began to wobble in his grasp. At once, Marco was at one side of him and the old soldier at the other, holding him up and keeping his crutches beneath his arms.

“I’m not going to faint,” he whispered, not sure once again if he were telling a lie or the truth. "But I felt as if I was. It was a bad fit, and I had to try and hold him. I was all by myself. The people in the other attic thought he was only drunk, and they wouldn’t come in. He’s lying on the floor there, dead.”

“Come and see my father,” Marco urged. “He’ll tell us what to do. Lazarus,” he said to the old soldier, “help him.”

The Rat shook his head. “I can get on by myself. Do you see my crutches? I did something for a pawnbroker last night, and he gave them to me for pay.” He had tried to sound as though he were his usual self, but he still felt unsteady, and thinking about the pawnbroker broke another sickening wave of shame over his head. 

He felt a strong hand on his elbow, and he leant against it for a brief moment. Then he straightened up as much as his back would allow. He didn’t know what Marco’s father would make of him. But a proud old soldier thought the Rat was too good to be allowed to tumble to the floor. And Marco—Marco cared. Marco cared for _him_. And that would give him more than enough strength to follow Marco down the hallway.

At the end of it was an open door, and beyond the door a sitting-room. Its paint was peeling, and its furnishings were old and shabby. But, as best he could tell in the meagre light of a single gas-burner, it was spotlessly clean.

And standing by its writing-desk was perhaps the most beautiful man the Rat had ever seen.

Had he not been told he was about to meet Marco’s father, he would have known it just from the sight of him: the same thick black hair, the same keen dark eyes, the same height into which Marco was obviously growing, and, most of all, the same bearing. Like his son, he stood straight-backed, attentive, and deeply— _still_. The kind of stillness one almost never saw in London, not among the living.

“Father,” Marco said, “this is the Rat.”

The Rat, who had stopped short and was now leaning on his crutches, stared wide-eyed at Marco’s father.

“Is that your father?” he asked, utterly unnecessarily. Then he felt a nervous, cynical laugh come upon him, to which he gave voice as he remarked, “He’s not much like mine, is he?”

Marco’s father did not laugh or smile in response, but neither did he frown. His expression made the Rat think of the one time he had been in a Papist church, when one of the Squad’s mother had died and they’d all gone to pay their respects for his sake. The statues of the saints had gazed down at all the mourners with the same deep, clear calm in their eyes, as if to say, _you cannot shock us, you cannot offend us, we will hear and answer your prayers no matter how low you have fallen._ For all that the Rat hadn’t a religious bone in his body, for the first time in his life he’d understood the point of church, if only for an hour.

“Tell me, lad,” Marco’s father asked softly. “What brings you here to-night?”

The Rat swallowed. “My father is dead, sir. I didn’t know what to do. I thought of Marco. I didn’t know where else to turn.”

“When did your father die?” It was asked ever so gently. “Do you know?”

“I do,” the Rat said. He was surprised to hear his own voice now, stronger, unfaltering, despite the subject at hand. “He couldn’t have died more than an hour ago. He woke me up with his drunken fit, and I held him through it till he was dead. Then I—I took a moment to gather myself, and I thought of Marco, and I remembered he lived at No. 7 Philibert Place. And I came here straightaway.”

“So his body is lying in the place where you and he take lodgings?” the man asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you any other family, child?”

“No, sir. My mother died when I was four. I’ve no other family besides.” It should have hurt, he thought, to speak of such things; he should have felt abashed to disclose them to a stranger. But he felt neither pain nor shame as he spoke the words. Marco’s father wanted to know, and the Rat knew the beautiful man would never think less of him for any of it.

“I will have your father seen to decently. In the meantime, you must sit, and you must eat. Lazarus, bring the Rat some hot coffee and a bite of food.”

“Haven’t had a bite since yesterday,” the Rat said, still staring at Marco’s father, as the old soldier strode from the sitting-room. “How did you know I hadn’t?”

“Because,” said the beautiful man, “you have not had time.”

Within a few moments, Lazarus had returned with a cup of coffee and a bit of bread smeared with butter. The Rat, who had settled himself gingerly on the edge of the arm-chair, made the crust disappear within a moment and all but tossed the coffee down his throat after it.

“And now that you are fed,” said Marco’s father, “you must sleep. You can sleep on the sofa here.”

The Rat felt himself redden. As worn as the sofa was, it was clean, and he was not. He shook his head nervously. “I—I can’t. Look at my clothes.”

The man merely shook his head and put a gentle hand on the Rat’s shoulder, guiding him toward the sofa. “Lie down and sleep. You will sleep a long time. But first you must tell me how to find the place where your father died, and I will see that the proper authorities are notified.”

The Rat told him how to get to Bone Court. He fell silent for a moment at the end, and then his curiosity got the better of him. 

“What are you doing it for—sir?”

“Because I am a man, and you are a boy,” came the quiet answer. “And this is a terrible thing.” And the beautiful man turned about and left the room.

Marco had at some point already disappeared up the stairs to his bed-room, and Lazarus was gone again from the sitting-room as well.

The Rat was alone.

He lowered himself onto the sofa so that again he rested on one haunch, and he leant the crutches against the outer side of the sofa’s arm. He removed his shoes, as he had—was it only a few hours ago?—and set them on the floor. Then he stretched out on the sofa. Its horsehair stuffing was uneven, bulging in some spots and missing in others. To the Rat, who had slept for years on a pile of rags, the sofa was as luxurious as the finest feather-bed.

He stared at the wall opposite and he thought of the words with which Marco’s father had left him. _I am a man, and you are a boy, and this is a terrible thing._ He thought of men who were not honourable toward boys. He thought of men who did terrible things, rather than made them right.

Then he thought of a tall, graceful, infinitely calm man who was all a father should be, and nothing like his own had been. He thought of dark, thoughtful eyes and a gentle voice; he thought of strong, slender hands that, though they were rough and unmanicured, were more beautiful than the soft ones of any swell’s. 

As if those thoughts were another feather-bed, he drifted off to sleep on them, and his rest was long, deep, and untroubled.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Tryfanstone](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/) for her wonderful beta work on this, and to [Halotolerant](http://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/) for [giving me the idea for it](http://surexit.livejournal.com/368266.html?thread=3107978#t3107978).
> 
> My headcanon for _The Lost Prince_ is that the events of the novel happened in 1912. I think that's because I was originally under the misimpression that the book was published that year, rather than 1915. The preceding summer, that of 1911, was [indeed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_United_Kingdom_heat_wave) the [hottest](http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/long-hot-summer-the-great-british-heatwave-of-1911-408738.html), and the [deadliest](http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/1911-heatwave-killed-hundreds-of-babies-in-london/), on record to date.
> 
> [This blogpost](http://braindiseases.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/seizures-associated-with-alcohol-intake/) was my source of information on tonic-clonic seizures induced by heavy alcohol consumption, also known as "rum fits." [This page](http://www.logicmgmt.com/1876/living/livingcost.htm) gave me a (very) rough idea of what things might have cost, with Tryfanstone providing more detail. Finally, Dickens' [_Sketches by Boz_](http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dickens/charles/d54sb/) inspired my descriptions of the pawnshop and of the man trying to pawn his tools.


End file.
